How to set up Google Analytics

Whether you’re running the simplest blog or an enormous international ecommerce site, you should be measuring how visitors interact with your website.
There are lots of analytics packages you can use. The most common - perhaps because it's free - is Google Analytics If you're new to analytics, this article will get you kick started. We'll help you install the software on your site. We’ll recommend some important business metrics you should be tracking. And we'll help you set up a keyword dashboard so you can track your traffic.

First, set up a Google account

To set up Google Analytics, you'll need a Google account. If you don’t already have one, you can sign up at Google.com
Click on ‘You’. Then sign up for an account.

This will give you a Google email address as well as access to many more of Google’s business applications.

Set up a Google Analytics account

Once you’ve got a Google account, you’ll want to set up a Google Analytics account (they are separate logins) at: www.google.com/analytics
(Incidentally, lots of marketers refer to Google Analytics as 'GA'. So, that’s what we’ll do from now on).
To get GA working on your site, you’ll need to add a small section of code to the pages you want to monitor.

This video from Ian Lurie, CEO of www.portent.com, an internet marketing company explains how to get the tracking code and how to install it on your site.
During the setup process, Google will ask if you want to share your analytics data with other Google products. Generally, I’d suggest sharing your data, as you’ll want to include information from Google’s Webmaster Tools

If you are using Google AdWords for your advertising campaigns, you can should check (tick) the “AdWords Campaigns” box too. This will help you monitor the visitors who arrive at your site via your AdWords campaigns.
As Ian mentions in the video, the installation procedure will be different for different sites. As you might expect, some WordPress themes come with admin panels that are designed to allow you to drop the GA tracking code onto your site quickly and easily. If you work with a web designer, s/he should be able to add the code quite easily.

Next steps

Once you’ve set up GA you’ll get loads of great marketing data for free. This article tells you more about what's available and explains how to monitor your traffic with Google Analytics.
But a lot of the data in GA won’t necessarily be in the format that’s best for your business. So, you’ll want to create bespoke reports that allow you to get to the important stuff quickly. Here’s what to measure - and how.

What should you measure?

Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, recommends that smaller businesses focus on four measures that will help improve their online marketing efforts:

• Cost per acquisition
• Bounce rate
• Abandonment rates
• Conversion rates

We’ll focus on each of those in turn.

Cost per acquisition

You’ve a small marketing budget. You need to make it count. So, you should always be trying to increase the amount of revenue you generate for each dollar you spend.
This involves calculating:

1. How much each of your marketing campaigns costs.
2. Measuring how much revenue it generates.
3. Your return on investment (ROI).

First time round, it will probably take you a bit of time to calculate the figures. But, once you’re in the habit, it’s very little extra work - and the information you’ll glean as a result will be invaluable.
You won’t find all the information you need in Google Analytics (GA). You might have to set up a spreadsheet where you calculate the profitability of your different marketing campaigns.
1. You'll need to calculate your costs yourself: the information won't be in GA.
You’re likely to be paying for your advertising campaigns (whether that's banner ads, Facebook ads, or AdWords clicks). There will be costs associated with your email marketing and SEO, too. For example, you'll be paying for your email software. And, in all your marketing efforts, there’s the cost of your time (or whoever's doing the work). So make sure you’re accounting for that too.
2. GA will allow you to see your traffic sources and conversions.
3. Armed with that information you should be able to create a spreadsheet that looks something like this to calculate your ROI:

These are sample figures for a one-product business. But, hopefully, it gives a sense of what you're looking for: low cost acquisitions.
If you sell more than one product, the sheet will look more complex, as you’ll need to take into account the profitability of each of your products.
You should aim to invest in the campaigns that have the best cost-per-acquisition.
You should always be aiming to reduce your cost-per-acquisition.
And if, over time, you find you can’t improve the high cost-per-acquisition campaigns, kill them. Invest your resources elsewhere.

Bounce Rate

The Bounce Rate metric in GA measures the proportion of visitors that arrive at your site and immediately click away again.
In GA, you’ll find your Bounce Rate report here:

Simply sort by Bounce Rate to see your worst performing pages.
Bounce Rate is not a very sophisticated measure, but it will help you identify pages that aren’t delivering what your customers want. When you find content with a high Bounce Rate, ask yourself:

• Are you targeting the wrong audience?
• Are you delivering the wrong content for your audience?
• Are you doing enough to get traffic circulating through your site?
• Is your page badly designed? Ie, is it unappealing, or difficult to navigate?

Abandonment rates

Lots of people visit your site wanting something from you. Many will make it to your sales page. But, for a variety of reasons, they’ll click away before making a transaction (or whatever your conversion happens to be).

• Perhaps they’re worried about you spamming their email address?
• Maybe your shopping cart is difficult to navigate?
• Perhaps your prices aren’t clearly stated?

Whatever the reason, these visitors are leaving, they’re keen to interact with someone. And, with a few small changes to your site, that could be you.
If you’ve an ecommerce site, optimizing your checkout pages - to reduce abandonments - is one of the highest-value pieces of work you can do.
If you have set up Goals and Goal Funnels in GA, these will give you a sense of where you are losing most traffic.
A Goal Funnel is simply a series of web pages that lead to your Goal. At each stage, you'll lose some potential customers. And, by measuring the losses, you'll be able to identify pages that aren't well-optimized for conversion.
For example, let's assume you're selling widgets online. You might set up a sales funnel that tracks visitors from your sales page to your landing page and on to your thank you page. The thank you page would be your Goal.
You'd set up a Goal Funnel to measure the drop-out rate from the sales page through to the thank you page.
If 10 people were to arrive at your sales page, and one ends up buying, we'd say that you have a 10% conversion rate:

Here's how a similar, real-life funnel might look as a Google Analytics report:

Improvements at the bottom of your sales funnel are particularly valuable, as they have a direct and immediate impact on sales. So, once you've identified the pages with the highest abandonment rate, try to identify WHY potential customers are leaving.

Setting up lead tracking and Goals

GA will provide you with lots of basic marketing data. It’s great to know how many people have visited your site, how many pages they visited, and what browser they’re using. But, it’s much more important to know whether you’re achieving your business goals: how much is your website helping your business?
This is where Goals can be really helpful.
GA allows you to set up Goals that are specific to your site. These might be email sign-ups to your newsletter, free trialists of your product, visitors that download a PDF e-book, or whatever. Your Goals will depend on what type of business you’re in. (Ecommerce conversions are measured separately, and we’ll discuss those later).
There are four ways of tracking Goals. You can measure:

• Visits to a specific page
• Time spent on site
• Pages viewed per visit
• A specific event, which can be almost anything you like

You can learn more about how to set up and track your Goals in this 40-minute webinar recording. It features Google’s Analytics Advocate, +Justin Cutrioni Inevitably, it focuses a little too heavily on measuring AdWords conversions, but otherwise it’s a really helpful guide, explaining what you might want to track - and why:

Set up ecommerce tracking

If you’re an online retailer, you’re probably more interested in how much you’re selling than any non-financial Goals. It’s possible to track your site’s sales in GA, using ecommerce tracking.
Ecommerce tracking works in a similar way to Goal tracking. The main difference is that you’ll need to add a specific piece of code to your receipt page.
Again, the set-up process will vary depending on how your site was built. For most people, it can be a tad tricky, so it’s a job that’s often left to a developer. If your developer hasn’t implemented GA tracking before, you may want to point them towards Google’s advice on how to use ecommerce tracking and how to set up ecommerce tracking
If you're running an ecommerce site, here are some simple actions that will help improve your checkout process:

• Reduce the number of fields that customers need to fill out.
• Show shipping costs up front (if you offer free shipping, make this a key marketing point).
• Where you can, reduce the number of checkout steps.
• Ask for account creation at the end of the process rather than at the start.

You’ll discover more ways to optimize your checkout in this article:
http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/checkout-optimization

Conversion rates

Make sure you’re aware of - and always trying to improve - your site’s conversion rates.
If your site’s generating more than a few sales a month, create an advanced segment in GA that allows you to track your best customers (those that purchase larger than average volumes). Identifying where these customer come from can help you focus your marketing towards high-value segments of your audience.
As a rule of thumb, you should invest in the traffic sources that are generating your best customers.

Add these Customized Dashboards

We know that GA can help you measure your business's key performance metrics.
Yet if you're focusing on improving your SEO efforts, you'll want more detailed information about your keyword data.
When tracking keywords, we’re particularly interested in non-brand keywords.
Why?
Well, if someone’s arriving at our site by searching for our brand, they must already know about us. Those visitors are important, of course. But, we want to investigate how NEW customers reach our site. So, we want to create a report that excludes brand terms.
I’ve set up a Keyword Dashboard that will help you set up a non-brand keyword report.
To set it up, make sure you’re logged into GA, then click on this link:
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=CebzkN90SFS_qeZJmEj-dw
We’ll now edit it, so that it excludes your brand terms and the ‘not provided’ keywords. This video shows you how:

You're all set!

That's it. You're all set. You should now be able to track your:

• Cost per acquisition.
• Bounce rate.
• Abandonment rates.
• Conversion rates.

And you're able to track your non-brand keywords.
Use this information to report - and improve - your return on investment. And, very quickly, you'll see your efforts rewarded with more traffic and sales.
Original post in http://www.wordtracker.com
How to set up Google Analytics